Mycelium iOS suffers from a major bug causing disappearing transactions

Mycelium is a bitcoin wallet app available on the iOS and Android devices, recently a bug has been discovered by the user markcoll from r/Bitcoin.

After sending a transaction if you don’t reach the final send screen or the app hangs up, after restarting the app the transaction history doesn’t update as if no transaction was sent – which makes sense. However, when trying to send a second transaction both transaction will simply disappear from your wallet and you will end up loosing those bitcoins.

The ridiculous part is that this issue has been written about over a year ago by /u/rassah:

This bug only appears on a small number of iOS devices, and the developer can’t even reproduce it on his own phone. It seems to have to do with the way iOS or Apple stores TouchID protected items. If you have this problem, please e-mail [email protected] so he can debug this issue, because it works perfectly on our devices, and our dev needs a broken version to see what actually went wrong.

So the Mycelium team was aware of this bug affecting a small amount of iOS devices yet they ignored it completely, only bringing it up a year later once another user complains. Furthermore, the developer had a whole year to investigate such a bug on an affected iOS device yet no update was issued. To add insult to injury, according to rassah the iOS developer quit about a year ago, meaning that this issue isn’t going to get fixed any time soon.

Issues like this give Bitcoin a bad reputation. It makes it seem that Bitcoin isn’t a reliable currency and that it is full of bugs, the reality of the situation is that Bitcoin has a $6 billion bounty for any bug which can break the system, while Mycelium has a year old bug which effectively makes the application insecure for any iOS user. The obvious solution for those using the Mycelium iOS app is to install Breadwallet, transfer all of your bitcoins from Mycelium to Breadwallet, and uninstall the Mycelium app.

About The Author

Mark is a 22 year old cryptocurrency entrepreneur. He was introduced to Bitcoin in 2013 and has been invovled with it ever since. He used to mine bitcoins and altcoins but now focuses on blogging and educating others about digital currencies.